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December 17, 2015

(++++) STRANGE CREATURES, REAL AND NOT

Glow: Animals with Their Own
Night-Lights. By W.H. Beck. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $17.99.

Jampires. By Sarah McIntyre
& David O’Connell. Scholastic. $16.99.

Sometimes reality trumps
fiction. The creatures shown in W.H. Beck’s Glow
look like invented otherworldly phenomena, things that cannot possibly exist.
But they are real, and they live right here on Earth. The key is that they
exist in places where more ordinary-looking animals cannot live – and despite
the size at which these unusual creatures are shown in the book, many of them
are actually quite tiny, so their apparent oddity and fierceness are a function
of our misperception of how big they are. Glow
is a book about bioluminescence – the word, with the way to pronounce it,
appears at the start. And Beck points out that readers are likely to be
familiar with some examples of the phenomenon, such as firefly lights. However,
“more than anywhere else on our planet, animals glow in the water,”
specifically in water so deep that sunlight cannot penetrate. Here very
strange-looking creatures make their own light – but, again, they are generally
very small strange-looking creatures,
much littler than they appear in the book. It is important, although difficult,
to keep this in mind when looking at, for example, the scaly dragonfish, which
looks like a massive toothy monster but in fact measures no more than eight
inches – which means its terrifyingly tooth-filled head, which is five inches
long in the book, is in reality no bigger than an inch or two. Similarly, the
green bomber worm, which releases glowing round balls when pursued, is more
than six inches long in the book but in reality measures only six-tenths of an
inch. The striking photographs here, which show the animals glowing against an
all-black background, make their colors and their offensive or defensive
strategies very clear, and the pictures in themselves have considerable beauty.
Glow is also a scientifically
accurate book, as far as it goes, explaining how the chemicals luciferin and luciferase are what create bioluminescence. The many uses of a glow
are well presented, too: to hide, to hunt, to trick an enemy or trap a
potential meal, to call for help, and in some cases for reasons not yet
explained. The book’s final two pages are a useful supplement, explaining the
true size of the creatures pictured and telling where they live. Not everything
shown here is an animal: the book includes the foxfire mushroom, and
single-cell dinoflagellates, although classified as animals, are difficult to
see as such. The point here is not classification, however, but basic
information on an unusual phenomenon that young readers may have encountered in
their own lives – most likely through those fireflies – but may never have
thought of beyond that. The variety of creatures producing bioluminescence is
indeed wide, and the phenomenon is indeed a fascinating one: Beck’s book may
well lead readers to seek further information elsewhere.

But there is no need to go
further than Sarah McIntyre and David O’Connell have gone to get information on
Jampires. They are small and
odd-shaped creatures distinguished by the fact that they do not exist outside
this book. The story is silly and endearing: young Sam finds all the filling
missing from his jelly doughnut, so he sets a trap at night, using the dry
doughnut – filled with ketchup – as bait. And sure enough, a couple of fanged,
pointy-eared critters show up, explaining that “we both got so hungry we
couldn’t resist/ slurping from what we could find./ A dollop of jam would never
be missed!/ Or at least, we thought you’d not mind.” The jampires take Sam on a
flight to their own land, which is “up through the start-speckled blue” and
consists of a gigantic jam jar and “doughnuts that looked plump as cushions” –
plus “mountains of blueberry pie,” presumably including jam filling. The
jampires’ realm, a kind of oddball modification of the Land of Sweets as seen
in Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, is packed
with all sorts of jam-based or jam-related goodies – and lots of smiling
jampires of all sizes. Sam and his newfound friends land in a “skyberry
orchard,” where jampire moms welcome them and thank Sam for bringing back their
“two jammy dodgers” (although, in truth, Sam did nothing but tag along as the
jampires found their own way home). The grown-up jampires decide that Sam
deserves a reward, so they now bring him a basket of jam-filled doughnuts every
day, and everything ends pleasantly stickily. The mild and silly story is well
complemented by the mild and silly illustrations – McIntyre and O’Connell both
write the tale and both illustrate it – and the story will especially delight
any child who is fond of jam-or-jelly-filled doughnuts but occasionally
discovers one that really ought to have more filling than it does. When that
happens, clearly jampires have been at work.